The four characters in Gabriel Charlebois-Plante’s new creation have their lives before them, literally, and a “room of their own”, of which they are nevertheless captive. Between four walls, posted at their window, they observe the outside world. Some work, others make lists, still others pray. They all go around in circles, unable to get through the door, devoured as they are by anxiety and doubt, prisoners of obsessive thoughts which are dragging them down. A powerful rereading of the myth of Sisyphus, This hill is never truly silent is a spectacle which presents itself to us and to our time like a mirror with a reflection that is disturbing to say the least.
Co-director of the company Creation in the bedroom – which has rarely lived up to its name as well as these days – Charlebois-Plante continues the work he began in 2018 by revisiting The Cid by Corneille in an unusual stage arrangement. This time, the performers perform on a stage covered with 5 tons of rocks, which is impressive in itself, but which above all serves the purpose brilliantly. In this theater of the absurd, where comedy and tragedy go hand in hand, where agoraphobia acts as the clever metaphor of an anxiety-provoking era which establishes individualism as a dogma, Étienne Lou, Amélie Dallaire, Elisabeth Smith and Papy Mbwiti deliver top-notch performance. Their bodies, assailed, painful, in constant imbalance, are engaged in a frenetic and convulsive score that commands admiration.
Since 2012, Charlebois-Plante has adopted several registers: from logorrhea toPopular and sensational history to the minimalism of White cube And Clap clap through the playful Plyball, without forgetting a detour to Rabelais. From On the appearance of bones in the body, presented last year at Prospero, the author seems busy with an alloy of the different tones that inhabit him. Written in one go during a sunny night at the top of an Icelandic volcano – this is what the creator revealed to us –, This hill is never truly silent interweaves four guilty voices, four linked destinies which brilliantly echo each other in order to question in a captivating manner and without ever preaching the notions of power, punishment and atonement.
In this sixty-minute dive where nothing is left to chance – each gesture, each movement, each word occupying a very precise position in the gear -, and where simplicity is a golden rule, we must salute the work by Odile Gamache (scenography) and Christophe Lamarche-Ledoux (music), but we must praise that of Julie Basse (lighting), whose ingenious design with a single projector (following) is neither more nor less than a fifth character. Its light beam sweeps the space, directs the gaze, offers a framework for the action, gives a materiality to the dichotomy which is at the heart of this flawless spectacle, that pitting the interior against the exterior.